Over 20 years, Acorn Gallery's roots have grown deep

Saturday

May 17, 2014 at 12:32 PMMay 21, 2014 at 10:59 AM

William J. Dowdwdowd@wickedlocal.com

About 250 people stopped by the Acorn Gallery on State Street Sunday afternoon, May 4, during a four-hour celebration of the art school’s 20th anniversary.Current and former students and anyone who is related in any way to the tiny art studio on the corner of State and Front streets marked the milestone with live music, good eats and friendly catching-up chatter.“People always return to this place no matter where they are in their lives,” said David Whelan, 27, a former Acorn student and Marblehead native now living in New York City after graduating from Yale University with a postgraduate degree in painting. “I learned everything here.”When there aren’t 250 people attending a party, the Acorn Gallery looks just like an art studio is supposed to look. Art supplies are everywhere. Several propped-up easels encircle a column upon which rest objects, ready to be painted.Finished paintings — many with ribbons dangling on them — hang from gallery space on the walls. Thick paint of just about every color can be found on palettes and on brushes. A bookshelf is stuffed with art history books.A garage full of kids“I studied child development, but my husband, Jack, was an art graduate of Boston University,” said Deb Highberger, who founded Acorn Gallery by happenstance in 1994. “I studied art from him when I was 20 years old, so he taught me everything I know and learned from him.”Highberger had been teaching full-time at the early childhood level when she founded the art school, accidentally, out of her home on Birch Street. The parents of two brothers, both of them dyslexic, asked her to teach them drawing.“I took them in my house garage where we had a studio and taught them,” Highberger said, adding that word quickly spread that she had “some success” with the two brothers. “People were asking me if I could teach their kids.”She continued, “In a very short order, I had about 20 kids in my garage.”It wasn’t long — 1995 — before she and Jack moved the school out of the garage, renting a small studio in the building in which the school continues to reside.Then more kids started coming. The school grew bigger and relocated in 1997 to the prominent space it occupies today.“When we first began renting this place, I was so little, [my mom] had to hold my hand walking across State Street,” said Alexis “Lexi” Baliotis, 26, Deb’s daughter, a graduate of Lyme Academy College of Fine Art and now second-generation co-owner of Acorn Gallery.Highberger eventually quit her early childhood gig to teach painting full-time, devoting herself completely to Acorn, which is “based on the understanding that a child’s involvement in the arts improves motivation, concentration, confidence and teamwork.”It’s within that framework that Jack and Deb (and up until recently Alexis) have granted 20 years’ worth of kids as much autonomy as possible in deciding what to paint while they supplied individual attention and a strong foundation in art theories, critical thinking and color variation.As Whelan attested, “They gave me a rigorous foundation but more importantly how to be present and honest with yourself and be a critical thinker.”More than just an art schoolHighberger explained that, until kids turn 12 or so, she lets them discover before entrenching them in color theory. In other words, she initially keeps instruction simple.“If a child is making a blue ocean, they’ll think blue,” Highberger said. “I’ll tell them to add light or dark blue, so that gets their motors thinking about different colors.”She continued, “If a kid is with us for the whole gamut from 4 years old through high school, people, by the time they leave us, they’ve had 12, 13 years of art foundations before college.”The Highbergers estimate that 5,000 students have passed through Acorn’s doors and that colleges have handed out over $8 million in scholarships to alumni. The school’s enrollment peaked in 2005 at 500 students.“These guys were a huge part of me getting a full scholarship,” said Christina Goodwin, who graduated from Boston University in 2005 on Sunday, May 18.Baliotis suspects outsiders look at Acorn and think, “‘This is just an art school.’ But it’s more than just that.”She continued, “This is a place where folks find community. You’ll hear people say, ‘This is my community.’”That community pulled together in 2008 during the so-called “Great Recession,” taking turns contributing art supplies and donations when enrollment went down.Goodwin, one of Acorn’s first students, identified with Baliotis’ statement.“I remember I needed a place to hang out with like-minded folks, like any other kid, so I was learning here but also found a surrogate family, too,” she said.By Goodwin’s senior year, she was at Acorn every night.“All I have to say is we try and teach at a high level,” Jack Highberger said of the business’ success. “In Marblehead, people care about education, so we get great support from our students’ parents because they stick with us.”The art school’s success has been built on not having a set of boundaries but rather organically changing to fill students’ needs in the community or individually.“We grew with the kids,” Deb said. “When they needed a portfolio for college, we make that happen.”‘Now I can call myself a painter’Acorn Gallery is a place where not only children take brush to paint to canvas but adults, too.Nancy Satin, who thought she “didn’t have an artistic bone in her body,” learned to paint at Acorn. She has been taking lessons since 1998, a couple of months after the Highbergers moved into their current location.“Those 16 years have effectively changed my life,” Satin said, addressing the crowd at the party. “When I started coming here, I barely knew how to draw. And by now I can call myself a painter, one with my own website, a blog and a Twitter account.”Satin, as one of the longest continuous students of Acorn, spoke on behalf of all the gallery’s adult students who “somehow found their way through that door.”She went on to mention the gift students had jointly bought for the Highbergers: a golden plaque, which will soon be affixed to a wooden green bench overlooking Marblehead Harbor in Clark’s Landing.The plaque reads: “In honor of the Acorn Gallery’s Debra and Jack Highberger. You changed our lives through art. Thank you from your loving students.”